That Old Devil Agenda (reposted)

Apologies to my dear Readers: no new post today. But because I promised to give you updates regarding yesterday's post, I will repost this one from August 19, 2013, which deals with a similarly unfortunate topic: the anti-gay agenda.... Thanks for understanding, and stay tuned!


 
It’s an old tune, a very old tune, perhaps a hymn tune. And the host of Focal Point crooned it very well: we must choose, America, between freedom and the homosexual agenda. And Scott Lively agreed—he notes that Hutchinson, Kansas, a town he deems “sleepy,” is considering adopting an antidiscrimination law for gay people. And that’s the thin edge of the wedge, the first step down the slippery slope. It started off in the 80’s with San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin (yup, my hometown) and look what’s become of them!

I listened, dear Reader, because I wanted to know—how virulent is this man, who decided to run down to Uganda and tell politicians and cops and preachers the “truth” about the homosexual agenda? As you may remember, things got a little outta hand, and the Ugandans came up with a bill so draconian that the world had to face them down. There was that provision of death for “aggravated homosexuality.” In fact, even Lively himself was upset. As stated in the Wikipedia article on him, he wrote:

[M]y advice to the parliament was to go the other direction from what they did to actually go on a proactive positive message promoting the family, promoting marriage, etcetera, through the schools, and that if they were going to continue to criminalize homosexuality that they should focus on rehabilitation and not punishment. And I was very disappointed when the law came out as it is written now with such incredibly harsh punishments.

So how virulent was he? My initial reaction was, “not so bad,” but that may in fact make him more dangerous. He presents himself as a scholar—no one, he says, knows more about this topic than he. He poses as unbiased; some homosexuals, he asserts, don’t molest children, but many do. He distorts history; the very basis of homosexuality has traditionally been between an adult male and a youth or teenage boy.

He has a flip chart, on which he displays the varying types of homosexuals; in the case of women, there are the butches and the fems, occupying the middle of the line graph. In the case of men, there is the super effeminate male on the right. And on the left, one step past “super-macho?”

Monster.

Yes, these are they hyper masculine, no mercy homosexuals that were the secret power within the Third Reich. These were the homosexuals that killed the Jews, that released the gas.

History is a smorgasbord for Lively—he munches on the Ancient Greek tradition of man / boy relationships, he chomps down on the morsel that there were homosexuals in the early days of Nazism, but that they were rigorously suppressed later. Oh, and that half a million gay people died in the gas chambers.

No, he says, most gay people are miserably unhappy—we are drowning ourselves in alcohol and drugs. And we therefore have to drag everybody down to our level—to our pit of despair and degradation. And how do we do that? By recruiting youths, which is called pederasty.

Nor did Lively concern himself just with Uganda. He also went on a fifty city-tour through Russia, and guess what? Provinces and districts throughout the country began passing draconian laws, essentially similar to Uganda’s law. Here’s what Masha Gessen wrote:

The first time I heard about legislation banning "homosexual propaganda", I thought it was funny. Quaint. I thought the last time anyone had used those words in earnest I had been a kid and my girlfriend hadn't been born yet. Whatever they meant when they enacted laws against "homosexual propaganda" in the small towns of Ryazan or Kostroma, it could not have anything to do with reality, me or the present day. This was a bit less than two years ago.

Hate is a virulent message, true, but does anybody think that one man alone—little Scott Lively—is capable of jumping on a plane, spending a week or two, and getting such spectacular results?

Of course not—here’s what I wrote, citing Wikipedia, on January 22 of this year:

The Fellowship, through Representative Joe Pitts (R.-Pa.), redirected millions in US aid to Uganda from sex education programs to abstinence programs, thereby causing an evangelical revival, which included condom burnings.

In a November 2009 NPR interview, Sharlet alleged that Ugandan Fellowship associates David Bahati and Nsaba Buturo were behind the recent proposed bill in Uganda that called for the death penalty for gays.[75] Bahati cited a conversation with Fellowship members in 2008 as having inspired the legislation.[76]

And who is Sharlet? The author of The Family, which details the shadowy combination of religious fundamentalism, politics, and corporations. Yes, through Doug Coe and his “family,” American tax dollars have made life hell for Ugandan and Russian LGBT folk.

And here’s where—only very slightly—I begin to feel sorry for Lively. He’s been used, and he may have to pay, as he should. Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) paired with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to haul Lively into court for hate crimes. And on Wednesday, 14 August 13, federal judge Michael Ponsor ruled that yes, the case can proceed.

Good for the judge!

So yes, it’s certainly true that someone out there has an agenda, but is it the homosexuals?

You decide.

Olympic Hypocrisy

Wow—wonderful what this blog can do! True, I had to keep harping about it, and I do apologize to any reader who may have gone a bit crazy, hearing my rants over and over. But admit it, dear Readers: Aren’t you glad we kept up the pressure? Because now we have it from a new-found friend, no less than Vladimir Putin himself, that the Winter Olympics in Sochi will be… OK, here’s The New York Times itself:

Speaking at a meeting with leaders of Russian winter sports federations, which was also attended by Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, Mr. Putin said Sochi would be fully tolerant. 

Oh, and the name of this article? Putin Says Sochi Welcomes Gays!

Guys?

Look, I have lived over half a century, and I’m hard pressed to think of a more blatantly false and outrageously self-serving statement. And memo to Putin? Gay people, generally speaking, are not fools. So if you think this statement gets you off the hook, think again.

The question, of course, is who is more turpid—sorry, computer, but I looked it up, and Nabokov used the word too—here: Putin and his heinous laws that criminalize even talking about homosexuality, or the Olympic Committee, which sat around and watched Putin enact these laws without raising a word of protest. Then, of course, things got hot, so the Olympic guys had to go and put pressure on the Russian president to make this ridiculous statement.

Well, this was not the only news about LGBT issues in the Times, today, because Frank Bruni had a story about Paul Singer, a billionaire Republican who gave a pot of money to Mitt Romney, but who is also giving money to the Human Rights Campaign. Why? Well, Singer among other things has a gay son—and a gay son-in-law. And he thinks support for gay rights is not incompatible with the Republican Party. Here’s what Bruni has to say:

In Singer’s view, gay rights are consistent with a Republican philosophy of individual liberty, and gay marriage is “an augmenter of social stability, family stability and stability in raising kids.” In other words, it’s conservative.

Nor is Singer the only Republican to join with the HRC—there’s also Daniel S. Loeb; here’s what he has to say:

As we witnessed in its successful campaign to advance marriage equality in the United States, HRC is a uniquely effective organization that achieves what it sets out to do.

Right—so what’s the campaign about? Well, the HRC has decided it’s time to act globally and support the organizations in other countries that are struggling to advance the causes of LGBT folk. Here’s what Singer has to say about the campaign:

“Every day around the world, LGBT individuals face arrest, imprisonment, torture and even execution just for being who they are,” said Paul Singer.

And guess what? The situation is getting worse around the world, just as it’s getting better in the United States. And why is that? Because we are exporting our bigotry around the world, as evangelical Christians have given up on the domestic market. So what have people like Scott Lively done? They’ve run down to Uganda and over to Russia to stir up hate and urge draconian laws.

Which makes it all the interesting what Bruni says:

It (the campaign) intends to name and shame American religious zealots who sponsor antigay campaigns abroad. So Republican money may wind up challenging a constituency within the party. (We’re most definitely not in Kansas anymore.)

Well, it’s an interesting world presenting itself today: Republicans supporting LGBT issues, and our new buddy in the Kremlin. Is it that I have the cynical blood of journalism coursing through my veins? Because I’m back to suggesting this….

Get going, Readers: download your print-ready image here at no cost, and order your label sheets (in an appropriate printing size) here! (Suggested brand; $6.68 per 100 labels is not bad!)

On Faith

I shudder to go here, because there’s no help for it—I am as unable to experience God in any of his / her various guises as a rock. And that means that I’m one of just 5% of the American population who are atheist.

Which is why I found myself watching Richard Dawkins yesterday, as I munched on a tuna fish sandwich in the café. Granted, Dawkins goes after the most extreme of the religious nuts—he tracks down Ted Haggard in Colorado, and yes, I can now tell you: it’s quite likely that the reverend was doing cocaine and call boys. Haggard, perhaps annoyed by Dawkins’s pristine Queen’s English, accuses Dawkins of intellectual arrogance.

Well, Dawkins gets around—from Colorado to the Middle East, where he interviews a Jew turned Muslim from New York. The Muslim angrily accuses Dawkins of dressing women as whores; Dawkins retorts hotly that he doesn’t dress women, they dress themselves. Not good enough for the Muslim—by allowing women to dress as whores, it’s as good as dressing them. Short version: women are chattel, to be dressed according to male dictates.

Every bush has a nut hiding underneath it, and Dawkins beats every bush. There’s the Reverend Keenan Roberts, who hit on the wonderful idea of the Hell House—a dramatic working-out of the post-life experience throughout all time of those who don’t personally accept Christ. Here’s the clip:

Oh, and here’s the description, as provided in YouTube:

Check out this "movie trailer" promo for the upcoming 2013 FIRE & THE FLAME theatrical outreach, presented by New Destiny Christian Center of Thornton, CO. This heaven and hell drama wowed audiences last year, and the spiritual impact was incredible! This year's production will feature 4 new scenes. Performances will be: Saturday, March 23 at 6pm, Sunday March 24 at 6pm, Saturday March 30 at 6pm, and Easter Sunday March 31 at 8:30am and 11am. All performances are free. A love offering will be received. Nursery available for children through 3 years of age. For more info visit www.Godestiny.org or call 303.289.1547. Senior Pastor: Keenan Roberts.   

In fact, this clip is substantially tamer than what Dawkins filmed—and Dawkins got right into it with the pastor. How old, he asks, should a child be before he is allowed to see the play—which features leaping flames and gay people groaning in agony and the devil leaping around tormenting people? And the reverend has the answer—twelve would be a good age. Dawkins protests—wouldn’t that be somewhat searing for a child’s mind? Better that, says Roberts, than growing up godless and falling into perdition.

Well, Dawkins goes through every lunatic religion and denomination—though curiously, he missed the Mormons—until at the very end, he found himself a good English Anglican, whose moderate views fell like manna in the desert.

Today, I started out watching Dawkins on the third of his series on The Age of Reason; today’s topic being the growth of “alternative medicine.” And I had just gotten to the wonderful picture of Dawkins sitting bemused and very much open-eyed as all the others in the room visualized a pearl, into which they were invited to step, and there they would find…

…their real selves!

Well, Dawkins has to find out about that, so he goes off to interview the healer, who claims to be able to alter DNA and who also informs him that most people have a double strand of DNA.

Dawkins is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, in evolutionary biology.

He was, then, very much interested in the topic—were there people who had more or less than a double strand of DNA?

The healer doesn’t miss a beat.

“The people of Atlantis had 12 strands of DNA,” she explains.

Predictably, Dawkins goes nuts.

Dawkins thinks that reason and science are under attack, and is out to challenge all religions—on the grounds that they promote irrational thought as well as divisions.

I’m both more extreme and less extreme. Though I cannot feel God, there are people who can, and who struggle as hard as they can to live up to beliefs that are truly admirable. And these people, acting together as a community, can accomplish what I—a solitary atheist—cannot. And these people adopt a theology that is both liberating and challenging—one that could help the world, if it ever got adopted.

My friend Susan, in fact, is one such person, and sent me a clip of another such person: John Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop. Right—if I could hear God, I would hang with Spong, and his flock. Check out a clip of a remarkable man:



I said that I was both less and more extreme than Dawkins. Why? Because for every man like Spong, there are men like Scott Lively, the evangelical who has exported homophobia to Uganda and Russia. This is a level of hypocrisy and hatred that even Dawkins doesn’t contemplate. And according to Wikipedia, Evangelical Protestants make up 19% of the American population. The mainstream protestants? 15%.

So I’m on the fence. In general, I cannot enter churches, and the smell of burnt-out candles is particularly upsetting to me—I associate the smell with the end of services at Christ Presbyterian Church. I dislike seeing crosses anywhere, and especially around people’s necks. And nuns—of which we have a full convent in Old San Juan? Don’t ask….

But before I throw out the bathwater, I’d like to see if somehow, somewhere, there might be a baby….

That Old Devil Agenda....

It’s an old tune, a very old tune, perhaps a hymn tune. And the host of Focal Point crooned it very well: we must choose, America, between freedom and the homosexual agenda. And Scott Lively agreed—he notes that Hutchinson, Kansas, a town he deems “sleepy,” is considering adopting an antidiscrimination law for gay people. And that’s the thin edge of the wedge, the first step down the slippery slope. It started off in the 80’s with San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin (yup, my hometown) and look what’s become of them!

I listened, dear Reader, because I wanted to know—how virulent is this man, who decided to run down to Uganda and tell politicians and cops and preachers the “truth” about the homosexual agenda? As you may remember, things got a little outta hand, and the Ugandans came up with a bill so draconian that the world had to face them down. There was that provision of death for “aggravated homosexuality.” In fact, even Lively himself was upset. As stated in the Wikipedia article on him, he wrote:

[M]y advice to the parliament was to go the other direction from what they did to actually go on a proactive positive message promoting the family, promoting marriage, etcetera, through the schools, and that if they were going to continue to criminalize homosexuality that they should focus on rehabilitation and not punishment. And I was very disappointed when the law came out as it is written now with such incredibly harsh punishments.

So how virulent was he? My initial reaction was, “not so bad,” but that may in fact make him more dangerous. He presents himself as a scholar—no one, he says, knows more about this topic than he. He poses as unbiased; some homosexuals, he asserts, don’t molest children, but many do. He distorts history; the very basis of homosexuality has traditionally been between an adult male and a youth or teenage boy.

He has a flip chart, on which he displays the varying types of homosexuals; in the case of women, there are the butches and the fems, occupying the middle of the line graph. In the case of men, there is the super effeminate male on the right. And on the left, one step past “super-macho?”

Monster.

Yes, these are they hyper masculine, no mercy homosexuals that were the secret power within the Third Reich. These were the homosexuals that killed the Jews, that released the gas.

History is a smorgasbord for Lively—he munches on the Ancient Greek tradition of man / boy relationships, he chomps down on the morsel that there were homosexuals in the early days of Nazism, but that they were rigorously suppressed later. Oh, and that half a million gay people died in the gas chambers.

No, he says, most gay people are miserably unhappy—we are drowning ourselves in alcohol and drugs. And we therefore have to drag everybody down to our level—to our pit of despair and degradation. And how do we do that? By recruiting youths, which is called pederasty.

Nor did Lively concern himself just with Uganda. He also went on a fifty city-tour through Russia, and guess what? Provinces and districts throughout the country began passing draconian laws, essentially similar to Uganda’s law. Here’s what Masha Gessen wrote:

The first time I heard about legislation banning "homosexual propaganda", I thought it was funny. Quaint. I thought the last time anyone had used those words in earnest I had been a kid and my girlfriend hadn't been born yet. Whatever they meant when they enacted laws against "homosexual propaganda" in the small towns of Ryazan or Kostroma, it could not have anything to do with reality, me or the present day. This was a bit less than two years ago.

Hate is a virulent message, true, but does anybody think that one man alone—little Scott Lively—is capable of jumping on a plane, spending a week or two, and getting such spectacular results?

Of course not—here’s what I wrote, citing Wikipedia, on January 22 of this year:

The Fellowship, through Representative Joe Pitts (R.-Pa.), redirected millions in US aid to Uganda from sex education programs to abstinence programs, thereby causing an evangelical revival, which included condom burnings.

In a November 2009 NPR interview, Sharlet alleged that Ugandan Fellowship associates David Bahati and Nsaba Buturo were behind the recent proposed bill in Uganda that called for the death penalty for gays.[75] Bahati cited a conversation with Fellowship members in 2008 as having inspired the legislation.[76]

And who is Sharlet? The author of The Family, which details the shadowy combination of religious fundamentalism, politics, and corporations. Yes, through Doug Coe and his “family,” American tax dollars have made life hell for Ugandan and Russian LGBT folk.

And here’s where—only very slightly—I begin to feel sorry for Lively. He’s been used, and he may have to pay, as he should. Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) paired with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to haul Lively into court for hate crimes. And on Wednesday, 14 August 13, federal judge Michael Ponsor ruled that yes, the case can proceed.

Good for the judge!

So yes, it’s certainly true that someone out there has an agenda, but is it the homosexuals?

You decide.

The Vivid Air

He’s a gay guy from perhaps the most homophobic country in the world—Jamaica—and he won an award named after the slain activist from a country that could also be the most homophobic country in the world—Uganda.

Well, Jamaica is in the news lately, since a transgendered teen, Dwayne Jones, was shot, stabbed, beaten and then run over by a car last weekend. Right—that’s pretty homophobic. But what’s even worse is that Jones’ father had driven him from the family home, and joined the group of neighbors who drove him from the neighborhood.

So he was living, this 16-year old kid, with three others in a derelict house in Montego Bay. He went to a party, was dancing, and someone noticed his feet, which were abnormally large for a woman’s. He tried to run; he didn’t get away.

What’s behind the persecution? Well, there’s a law dating from 150 years back banning sodomy. There was a tradition in colonial times of sodomizing black slaves as a form of punishment. There are the usual right-wing fundamentalists who have whipped up the masses in places like Uganda—remember Scott Lively? But Jamaica has found a native ingredient to toss into the usual stew—and that’s hate-mongering reggae singers.

Things are so bad for gay people in Jamaica that a lot of them are fleeing—or trying to. That’s what Maurice Tomlinson did when a local newspaper outed him; he immediately began receiving death threats. So he escaped to Canada, where he married his soul mate, Tom Decker.

“In Canada I have a husband, in Jamaica I have a good friend,” he said recently, when he also revealed that he’s had three death threats since the local Jamaican press published the news. So he no longer goes to bars or even parties—he’s under a modified, self-imposed house arrest.

The good news is that he won in 2012 the David Kato Vision and Voice Award. And that has given him, he says, a place at the table; with that, and the support of his organization…well, let him tell the story:

I was able to be a part of the first ever legal challenge to the Jamaican anti-sodomy law before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, successfully challenged Coca-Cola for their support of homophobic murder musicians in Jamaica, launched a constitutional claim against Jamaican television stations for their refusal to air a tolerance-themed ad in which I appear, confronted the government of Trinidad about its atrocious immigration law that bans the entry of marginalized groups such as the disabled, homosexuals and sex workers, and also traveled the world to share with other LGBT advocacy groups the hard-won skills I developed as an activist. It was also AIDS-Free World that nominated me for the David Kato Vision and Voice award. I simply could not have achieved my advocacy successes without them by my side. So I publicly thank AIDS-Free World and hope my successor has an equally supportive organization or group to call 'home.'

So who, you might ask, is David Kato?

Kato was the first openly gay Ugandan, a teacher, a man who had lived for six years in South Africa, which was more liberal. Returning to Uganda, Kato made the decision to come out, did so at a press conference, and got jailed for a week because of it. This, however, didn’t stop him—he went on to become one of the founding members of SMUG—Sexual Minorities Uganda. In 2010, he gave up teaching, and worked full time as an activist.

But the year before, he had attended a UN human rights conference. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

According to a series of confidential cables written by a Kampala-based United States diplomat and later released by WikiLeaks, Kato spoke during a November 2009 United Nations-funded consultative conference on human rights. During the conference, Kato spoke on the issue of LGBT rights and the anti-LGBT atmosphere in the country, but members of the Uganda Human Rights Commission "openly joked and snickered" during the speech, and a rumor circulated that David Bahati MP, the leading proponent of the Uganda Anti-Homosexuality Bill, had ordered the Inspector General of Police to arrest Kato, causing Kato and other attending members of SMUG to leave the conference immediately after he finished the speech. Bahati then made a "tirade against homosexuality" to the conference, resulting in massive applause and Martin Ssempa, an Evangelical Christian cleric, pounding his fist on the table in agreement.[7]

And then, a local newspaper published his name and address—as they did of a hundred other persons—in an inflammatory campaign to out gay people. (How inflammatory? If memory serves, one of the banners read, “HANG THEM!)

Kato took the newspaper to court—he won, and got a $600 settlement.

He never got to enjoy that 600 bucks; he was murdered shortly afterwards. But even after death, the insults continued. Back to Wikipedia for a description of the event:

Kato's funeral was held on January 28, 2011, in Nakawala. Present at the funeral were family, friends and co-activists, many of whom wore t-shirts bearing his photo in front, the Portuguese "la [sic] luta continua" in the back and having rainbow flag colors inscribed onto the sleeves.[19] However, the Christian preacher at the funeral preached against the gays and lesbians present, making comparisons to Sodom and Gomorrah, before the activists ran to the pulpit and grabbed the microphone from him, forcing him to retreat from the pulpit to Kato's father's house. An unidentified female activist angrily exclaimed "Who are you to judge others?" and villagers sided with the preacher as scuffles broke out during the proceedings. Villagers refused to bury Kato at his burial place; the task was then undertaken by his friends and co-workers, most of whom were gay.[20] In place of the preacher who left the scene after the fighting, excommunicated Anglican Church of Uganda bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo officiated Kato's burial in the presence of friends and cameras.

Right—that’s one you’d remember!

And who, by the way, is excommunicated Bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo, and why is he excommunicated?

Well, he’s a theologian who studied at Union Theological Seminary and was ordained at St. John the Divine. He’s an LGBT activist who got into a scrap with the archbishop, who turned around and excommunicated him.

 Homosexuality is illegal in more than 70 countries, but that’s the least of the problem. What’s truly scary is that there are places in the world—Russia, Jamaica, Uganda—where LGBT people live very realistically in fear for their lives. And there are people like David Kato and Maurice Tomlinson who—against all odds, despite the churning stomachs, the sweaty palms, the dry mouths—find the courage to stand up, speak out, tell the truth to power.

Women and men who leave the vivid air, as the poet said, signed with their honor.

Good Old American Hate

I have a theory—if they can live it, I can watch it. So I didn’t back off, when I saw the hour-long documentary from the BBC titled “The World’s Worst Place to be Gay.” I stayed true to my principles, but never has my right index finger more itched to click a mouse.

So I spent some 57 minutes watching a very cute, engaging British guy talking with Ugandans. That was the redeeming feature. What made the video almost unbearable was seeing the Ugandans, often very charming, but almost consistently filled with hate.

Our hate—if, like me, you are from the United States. Because up until a decade or so, most people in Uganda were not terribly accepting of LGBT folk, but they also weren’t filled with hate towards them.

All that changed when a guy named Scott Lively, the pastor of the Abiding Truth Ministries, located in Springfield, Massachusetts. Lively makes it his chief business to go after gay people; and to say that he’s virulent is to speak mildly. Think I’m exaggerating? Well, check out the clip below.

As you could see, that was from the 2009 visit to Uganda, and Lively lived up to his name. Here’s the Boston Magazine on the subject:

The evening of his arrival, he says, he met with more than 50 members of Parliament. He also claims to have spoken privately for 30 minutes with the country’s minister of ethics and integrity. In all, he estimates, he directly addressed about 10,000 people. And then there’s the much wider audience he reached with his media appearances. He was particularly proud of what he’d managed to accomplish at the Hotel Triangle conference. On March 17, while still in Uganda, he boasted online that someone in Kampala had told him that his campaign there had been “like a nuclear bomb against the ‘gay’ agenda,” and he went on to say that he prayed that this was true.

The effect? Homophobia exploded across Uganda, and culminated in what has been called the “Kill the Gays Bill.” And no, this is not hyperbole, here is one LGBT activist, Frank Mugisha, on the bill:

It introduces the death penalty for any homosexual person living with HIV/AIDS, so if someone is born with HIV and they come out gay, they should be killed. It has aggravated homosexuality — any kind of male rape, they should be killed, and if any person has sex with anyone below the age of 18, that’s death penalty. If any person engages in same-sex acts with someone who is disabled, that is also death penalty. Or if any person engages in same-sex acts with someone who they are in authority of. So, for example, if I have sex with my boss, my boss can go for the death penalty because they are in authority over me. There’s death penalty for serial offenders, so if you break the law many times, then you can also be killed.

OK—now what about heterosexuals? Here’s Mugisha again:

The bill has a clause that says you should report any person who is known or perceived as a homosexual to the authorities, so that means families have to report their own children, doctors have to report their clients, priests have to report people who come to confess about anything that is related to homosexuality. If they don’t (report), they become criminals. The bill also requires Uganda to withdraw from all international treaties that are in favour of sexual orientation and gender identity, and (it) requires all NGOs working in Uganda — if they are receiving funding from any organization affiliated with an organization that works on sexual orientation or gender identity — (to be) deregistered in Uganda.

Mugisha is the director of Sexual Minorities Uganda (SM-UG), and a total hero. Actually, anyone who is openly gay in Uganda at the moment is a hero. And so it’s not surprising that he has done the right thing: taken Scott Lively to court.

SM-UG is hardly a major force—it’s an umbrella organization of 8 groups, each with about 30 people; we’re talking, then, about 240 people in a country of 33 million. So SM-UG partnered with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to bring Lively into court for violating the Alien Tort Statute, which allows foreigners whose human rights have been violated to file suit in US courts.

Right—so what kind of abuse are we talking about? Beatings, murder, stoning of houses, and one particular abuse—newspapers printing photos and addresses of gay and lesbians. Oh, and one newspaper does it with the headline, “Hang them!”

Gay people, then, are frequently hounded out of their neighborhoods, and live, as you can see in the video below, in the worst possible conditions.

There are two important facts: the CCR states that Lively has traveled to over 40 countries, and that he is, in the words of the Public Research Associates, “globalizing the U.S. culture wars.”   And lastly, consider these words, when the Ottawa Citizen asked Mubisha what activists outside of Uganda could do to help:

Activists? I think that would have been the frustrating question, that the LGBT community has not helped us, has not stood by us. Because, like you said, people have gotten their rights here, they feel there is no need to get engaged in the other global civil rights for LGBT people, so the LGBT people have sort of taken a step back, they don’t really care. People in Uganda think we receive tons and tons of support from gay groups in the U.S. and Europe. Not at all. It is mostly human rights organizations that are not entirely focused on LGBT issues that work in supporting us.

Ouch. OK, guys—here’s what the CCR says we can do.

Get Involved

⇒       Share this factsheet and information about the case via social media and blogs.

⇒       Sign up on CCR’s website for email alerts so you can take action as needed.

⇒       Write a letter to the editor of your local paper about the role U.S. evangelicals are playing in spreading hate in Uganda and elsewhere.

For More Information:

www.ccrjustice.org/LGBTuganda

I’d add two more things. Check out the website for Sexual Minorities Uganda: http://www.smug.4t.com/index.html And then consider making a donation and following some of the suggestions in the website for International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Campaign: https://www.iglhrc.org/content/support-our-work

People started taking gay people seriously when they saw us pushing baby carts and changing diapers. We fought hard and—most of us, most of the time—we won. Now it’s time to look around at the rest of the world.
 

When Religion Gets it Right

Alan Chambers said he was sorry in a lengthy apology; here’s part of what he said.

Please know that I am deeply sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly “on my side” who called you names like sodomite—or worse. I am sorry that I, knowing some of you so well, failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know. I am sorry that when I celebrated a person coming to Christ and surrendering their sexuality to Him that I callously celebrated the end of relationships that broke your heart. I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine. 

Chambers was head of the largest “ex-gay” group, Exodus International, which promulgated the theory that gay people could change their sexual orientation through a deep personal relationship with God. That, coupled with “reparative therapy” would be enough. And if didn’t work? You weren’t trying hard enough, or the demon was too strongly attached to your soul.

To call it “reparative therapy,” however, is to legitimize barbarity.

So Chambers has apologized, and gone further: he has shut Exodus International down. And that leads to the question: how to forgive?

“Sorry is the cheapest coin in the vocabulary,” said a character in one of my favorite books, and I knew immediately what she meant. The amount of damage that the ex-gay movement has done is enormous; people exposed to reparative therapy are eight times more likely to attempt suicide; six times more likely to be severely depressed; three times more likely to use illegal drugs.

So sorry is not enough. What has to be done?

Two things.

I heard a TED talk recently by a South African who discussed what happened after apartheid. How was the nation to heal? How do you get over wounds like that?

The solution was a nation-wide series of reconciliation meetings, where blacks and whites, abusers and abused, came together, shared their stories and pain, listened to each other. Chambers started that process three months ago, when he sat with the people he had harmed in a church basement in Los Angeles. The event was filmed, and will be aired tonight on Lisa Ling’s “Our Americas.”

The question in my mind is whether that’s enough. For many, many years I refused to go into a church—making one exception only for St. John the Divine in New York City. Now, after years of movement, effort, and work by the Episcopalian Church, I could enter their places of worship. But I can’t think of any other church I could say that about.

Nor was I particularly harmed by the church—my parents were only nominally religious, I never took the thing seriously enough to care what they taught about homosexuality. But I had many friends who did, and who suffered gravely at the hands of organized religion. And if coming out was one of the five hardest things I’ve done in my life, I place some of the blame on the church. So yeah, I was affected; we all were.

So Chambers, you’re gonna have to do much more. You’re going to have to apologize, decry reparative therapy, travel the country giving speeches welcoming LGBT people into your church, stand up for marriage equality, start organizations, raise money for victims—in short, do a lot of actions that tell gay people, yeah, you’ve changed. We can trust you.

That was number one.

Number two?

There are people in religion who get it, and whom we should support. On of them is an Episcopalian priest, the Reverend Albert Ogle. Gay himself, he spent a lot of time advocating for marriage equality in California, where he lives, when the thought struck him: all the work he was doing in a developed country was simply making it more difficult for people in undeveloped countries.

There are 76 countries where homosexuality is still a crime. And increasingly, those countries are becoming more repressive, not less so. Why? Ogle likens it to big tobacco: as the market declines in the developing world, businesses look to new markets.

Remember the family, the super-secret organization that organizes the National Prayer Breakfast? Remember Scott Lively, the guy who went down to Uganda and spoke to members of parliament, giving them the news that the Nazi and Rwanda genocides were caused by gay people?

In addition, there’s been a flood of money given to religious groups under George W. Bush’s “faith based initiative” program.

So Ogle makes the point—is this simply a stunt, shutting down Exodus International? There’s still Exodus Global, and that’s where the real work is going on.

Ogle has set up a foundation, the St. Paul’s Foundation for International Reconciliation; here’s what he has to say:

 The Foundation was created in 2010 as an IRS 501 (c) 3 non-profit corporation and is a registered California charity.

Our focus has been on the intersection of human rights, health, education and faith, by providing resources for emerging grass roots organizations and leaders in the Global South. Local organizations are given assistance to create innovative HIV education and prevention programs, women’s development and self employment programs and providing training and education projects to build sustainable communities. Educational programs in Europe and North America seek partner congregations, foundations and donors to provide funds, technical assistance and advocacy, so that marginalized groups can be included more deliberately in their own larger communities.

In addition to the foundation, Ogle has created a website, 76crimes.org, which focuses attention on repressive countries around the world. I didn’t know that Jamaica—two islands away—is scheduled to have a mass protest against repealing the anti-buggery law on Sunday, and that the event was organized by the island’s churches.

So yes, we have to keep up the fight. And yes, we have to reach out and help the millions of people who have it worse.